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Isao Harimoto, a Korean-Japanese baseball player who holds the all-time hits record in Nippon Professional Baseball and survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a child, has died at the age of 86.
The Japanese Professional Baseball Meikyukai, an association of elite former players also known as the Golden Players Club, announced Thursday that Harimoto died Wednesday afternoon. No cause of death was announced. The organization said it held "deep respect and gratitude" for his achievements and contributions to the sport.
Harimoto accumulated 3,085 hits over a 23-season career that ran from 1959 to 1981, a total that remains unmatched in Japanese professional baseball.
He is the only player to reach 3,000 hits entirely within the league. He finished his career with a .319 batting average, 504 home runs, 1,676 runs batted in and 319 stolen bases across 2,752 games.
He is the only Nippon Professional Baseball player to combine at least 500 home runs with 300 stolen bases, a power-and-speed threshold reached in Major League Baseball only by Barry Bonds, Willie Mays and Alex Rodriguez.
Harimoto began his professional career with the Toei Flyers in 1959 and was named Pacific League Rookie of the Year in his debut season
He won seven batting titles, including four in a row from 1967 to 1970, and was named the Pacific League's Most Valuable Player in 1962, the year the Flyers won their first Japan Series championship.
He later played for the Yomiuri Giants and the Lotte Orions before retiring in 1981. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1990.
Harimoto was born Jang Hun in Hiroshima on June 19, 1940, to Korean parents who had moved to Japan while the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule.
At age four, an accident left him with severe burns to his right hand, permanently damaging several fingers.
The injury forced him to learn to throw and bat left-handed despite being naturally right-handed, and he later used a specially designed glove to field the ball with his injured hand.
A year later, on August 6, 1945, Harimoto was in Hiroshima when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city.
His family's home stood about two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the hypocenter, shielded partly by a small hill. Harimoto and one of his sisters survived after their mother placed herself in front of them; she was wounded by flying glass in the process.
Harimoto later spoke publicly about his experience as a hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivor, and advocated against war and nuclear weapons.
He retained South Korean citizenship for most of his life despite being born and raised in Japan, and revealed in a 2024 interview that he had obtained Japanese citizenship several years earlier.
After retiring as a player, Harimoto worked as a television commentator and baseball analyst.
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